A number of years ago, I was pressed into emergency service as the coach of my daughter’s team in the Greenwich House Girls’ Basketball League.
These were only 13-year-olds, but the experience remains one of the most emotionally draining of my athletic career — and that includes high school, three years as a starting cornerback in college and three decades covering sports.
No matter how long you have played, no matter how much you have watched, no matter how often you have been labeled a coach on the court, you are never prepared for the extent to which coaching can take over your life. Special practices. Secret practices. Ordering all kinds of completely unnecessary practice equipment.
That has all come to mind as I’ve watched Derek Fisher make the transition from being a player this time last year to being the coach of the Knicks.
For those who have played the game from a young age, the distance between the hardcourt and the head coach may seem short. The emotional distance is incalculable.
“I’m learning that,” Fisher said recently, after the Knicks had lost yet another game.
The season is young, but he has already aged.
Fisher played 18 N.B.A. seasons and earned a reputation as the quintessence of a floor leader. But even Fisher was not really prepared for the tremendous day-in, day-out drain — the impending sense of gloom that clings like a shadow.
“As a coach, you’re always searching,” Fisher said. “Even after a win, you’re still searching.”
For two quarters Saturday in Atlanta, the Knicks offered fans a glimpse of a bright future. For 24 minutes, the ball moved in and out and around. Carmelo Anthony caught it and got rid of it, the three-guard offense setting the fast-paced tempo Fisher has preached, with Anthony surrounded by shooters.
The Knicks built a 15-point lead in the first half. They were playing with their hearts, not out of a book.
Then it all fell apart. The third-quarter blues set in once again; the magic evaporated. The Knicks reverted to being that work in progress.
After the game, the players spoke from their narrow perspectives. Fisher carried the weight of the loss.
The difference between wearing a uniform and wearing the coach’s tailor-made suit is being accountable for the whole.
“As a player, I think you kind of know whether you did everything you could have or not,” Fisher said. “As a coach, you don’t know. Could I have prepared them better? Could I have put this guy in instead of this guy? You always have those questions.”
The loss was the Knicks’ fourth straight. On Friday night, after the Nets dealt the Knicks their third, the star Nets swingman Joe Johnson said that from the vantage point of a player, the greatest transition to coaching lay in managing relationships and personalities.
“As a coach, one thing you have to understand: Not every player in the locker room is going to like you — that’s it,” Johnson said. “There are going to be nights that you may not play this guy or that guy, and he’s going to be mad at you. As a coach, you can’t worry about it. You got to keep going. I think that’s probably one of the most difficult things. “
Tommy Amaker, the men’s basketball coach at Harvard, said the hardest adjustment for a former player was “always having to think about everyone — not just yourself.”
Amaker, who was an all-American at Duke, had an N.B.A. tryout and then embarked on a coaching career, eventually becoming the coach at Seton Hall, Michigan and Harvard.
So what must former players absolutely do in making the career change?
“Don’t forget you were a player!” Amaker said. “Knowing when to back off, remembering things that you wished coaches would do or say when you played.”
The larger question is, if a former player with no coaching experience can step in and lead a team, what does that say about the profession? Either we have all been putting too much stock into what it really takes to be a coach, or these N.B.A. teams are putting in too little.
I will always vote for experience when it comes to effective coaching. The player who retires and succeeds immediately as a coach is the exception, Billy Cunningham perhaps as the best example.
Cunningham, who had a phenomenal career as a player, sustained a career-ending knee injury during the 1975-76 season and was named the Philadelphia 76ers’ coach in November 1977. Philadelphia reached the playoffs in each of its eight seasons under Cunningham, reaching the N.B.A. finals three times and winning the 1983 championship.
With the jury still out on Fisher and Jason Kidd, who is now with the Milwaukee Bucks after coaching the Nets last season, Cunningham remains an anomaly — for good reason. Becoming a great coach is a full-time job that requires some form of apprenticeship, even if, as in Mark Jackson’s case, it comes in the broadcast booth.
The path of Magic Johnson, a Hall of Fame point guard whose greatness did not translate to coaching, is more the norm. Johnson, who initially retired as a player in 1991, briefly coached the Los Angeles Lakers at the end of the 1993-94 season. The team won five of his first six games but lost the next 10. Johnson said he was finished with coaching.
When Phil Jackson was hired as the Knicks’ president, the team became all but committed to hiring a coach with no N.B.A. experience because familiarity with Jackson’s triangle offense was a requisite and no established coaches met that criterion. Steve Kerr, who played under Jackson with Chicago, and Fisher, who played under Jackson with the Lakers, were the primary candidates.
Kerr, who had already served as Phoenix’s general manager, surveyed the terrain, put emotion aside and wisely chose Golden State. Jackson turned to Fisher.
Kerr’s team, filled with playoff-caliber talent, started 5-0 before losing on Sunday. Fisher’s squad, ill-suited for the system he is trying to install, has struggled.
As for my two-week stint as a coach, the experience led me to vow never to call for the firing of a coach merely as a matter of sport.
It also drove home the necessity of a coach’s having a duffel bag full of slogans. Fisher’s mantra through the first month of the season has been “keep the trust.”
Given the neurotic marketplace in which he works, Fisher may want to add the slogan of the former politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: “Keep the faith, baby.”